Verizon iPhone sales will come mostly at AT&T’s expense says analyst

The Apple iPhone fan and smartphone world has been clamoring since the original iPhone was launched in the US for the hot gadget to come to more carriers in America. The next big carrier to get the iPhone is widely believed to be Verizon and some analysts are weighing in on how adding the iPhone to Verizon will affect sales for AT&T and Apple.

According to Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster adding Verizon as a new vendor for the iPhone will only add about 2.5 million more iPhones on the US market. It’s worth noting that historically Munster’s Apple predictions are patchy at best. Still, Munster is not alone in predicting that adding Verizon as an iPhone seller won’t affect the Apple bottom line as much as it has in the UK and Europe when additional venders were added. It’s also worth noting that Verizon has seen sales of Blackberry handsets plummet to only 20% of its sales in the face of robust Android offerings, adding the iPhone is likely to make Blackberry sales even worse for the carrier.

In the UK when a new carrier was added AppleInsider reports that the growth in the user base for the iPhone grew at about a 1:1 rate with little losses to the previous iPhone provider. With the long and storied issues on the AT&T network, many of the analysts expect that Verizon will gain many of its customers by way of defections from AT&T. BMO Capital Markets recons Apple will sell 8 million iPhones with Verizon. Barclays Capital analyst Hames Ratcliffe says 9 million will be sold at Verizon while Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig predicts “at least 10 million sold.”